A co-worker showed me this pretty slick terminal multiplexer the other day, so I thought I’d give it a try. Digging through the man(1), I can honestly say I’ve never seen one with so much content in it! I gave it a few pokes with a stick that day, but never actually worked in it.

Today, I dove right in and started playing around. What’s the first thing I noticed? The most used “tool” in Linux; the one that most thanklessly saves all of us keystrokes and brain-cycles; tab-completion… missing! This would be useful and a tad frustrating to be without.

Off to zee Googles…

Found this post, with a solution. Posting the content below for posterity.

tmux and bash tab completion

In a move of wt[h], somewhere along the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, tmux, bash development chain someone decided to add this little gem of a key binding:

bind-key -n Tab clear-history

I found this using tmux list-keys from the command line. You have to have a running tmux session for that command to give you non-error output. I digress.

SERIOUSLY?!?!?!?!? I mean, the tab key. You know, the one you hit at least 1 gajillion times per terminal session. When you’re typing in your editor. When you’re CDing around the filesystem. When you’re <insert favorite command-line activity>. You probably hit Tab without the command modifier in front.

They mapped that to clear the history, shutting down whatever else it may have done. This one is SO ODD, that I can only imagine there was some really good and crazy reason for it. I can’t imagine what that is, but perhaps someone could enlighten me.

To overcome this “feature” add the following to your .tmux.conf. I did.